


Carcharodon

by spicedpiano



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Beaches, Charles Being Concerned, Charles Is a Darling, Erik Has A Shark Kingdom, Erik Is A Handsome Shark, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, North Carolina, Sharks, Sweet, Were-Creatures, Wereshark, shark week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 05:35:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/487293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicedpiano/pseuds/spicedpiano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Charles is a marine veterinarian and Erik is the were-shark he fell in love with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carcharodon

**Author's Note:**

> _Carcharodon_ is the genus of the great white shark. (Fun fact: the great white shark is the only known surviving species within this genus.)
> 
> \--
> 
> This work was inspired by Shark Week, because we all need more shark!Erik in our lives.
> 
> A million thanks to **Tahariel** and **Unforgotten** for beta-ing this work, and for all the encouragement. :)
> 
> This work was written for **pallorsomnium**. Hopefully it will ease the pain of having her wisdom teeth extracted.
> 
> \--

Charles stands at the edge of the sea, the salt water lapping at the toes of his boots. He gazes out toward the horizon, frowning.

It’s growing late. The sun is setting, leaving the ocean dark and limitless, stretching out across the world. Cold comes on the heels of dusk, the wind off the water stinging his cheeks – 

\- and on the wind, the smell of blood.

*

It’s another hour before he senses him; Erik’s presence is like a familiar taste on the tip of his tongue, as identifiable when he is like this as he is in human form.

Charles hurries down the beach, first aid kit in hand. He follows that muted Erik-scent in his mind and finds him just past the dock, a large and rounded shadow rising up from the sand, twitching slightly in the open air.

He drops down to his knees. “Erik,” he whispers. 

The shark shudders once and Charles feels Erik’s mind roiling within his own, sick and afraid.

“You got caught in a net,” Charles says, when he pieces together the fragmented images from Erik’s shark-memory. The frantic pulse of panic is still all too fresh. “And then … a harpoon?” He frowns. “… Whalers? Or smugglers?”

But of course Erik does not respond. His sides heave, gills straining for breath.

Charles pulls open the kit and puts on a pair of latex gloves before he gingerly presses two fingers to the back of the shark’s head. Erik gnashes his teeth, and were he not so weakened, perhaps Charles would have withdrawn. But as it is ….

“It’s almost time,” he says, stroking lightly. “Ssh. Just wait. Almost time.”

He glances at his watch; the seconds seem to tick past far too slowly, stretching too long. It is agonizing, watching – feeling – Erik struggling for breath, when the ocean is but a scant few feet away, and yet being incapable of doing anything to help him. 

At last, the hour hand of his watch clicks forward to nine o’clock.

Charles’s heart is in his throat.

The skin beneath his hand changes, going softer, warmer. He feels the crack of bones breaking and then realigning, feels the echo of Erik’s pain when his muscle fibers tear and then knit themselves together all over again.

It seems to last forever, and yet just moments later it is Erik’s human form lying on the beach – naked, unconscious, one hand stretched out toward the sea as if he could drag himself back beneath the waves.

“Thank you,” Charles whispers, and squeezes his eyes tight shut.

*

Erik wakes up eight hours later, blinking slowly in the gray light of early morning. He looks pale; dawn is not nearly so forgiving as it should be. 

Charles sits at his bedside, curled up in his rickety wooden chair, watching through half-lidded eyes. “Hey,” he murmurs. He reaches out a hand, touches the backs of his fingers to Erik’s brow as if to check for fever. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired.” Erik shifts slightly and then winces, gaze flicking down to the bandage Charles has carefully wrapped around his arm.

“Careful,” Charles says. “You’re hurt.”

“How bad?”

“I sutured it shut. Twenty-four stitches. I gave you IV antibiotics; hopefully there’s no need to worry about infection.” He unfolds his legs, bringing his feet back down to the floor. “Even so, I’d be careful for the next few days.” A brief pause. “That means no going down to the docks.”

_”What?”_

“You heard me. It’s too dangerous, Erik. I won’t have you doing any heavy lifting while you’re in this state.”

Erik looks livid, his lips thinning out as he presses them together. “I have to work. This happens once a month, Charles. It’s my life: I turn into a shark for a week, it’s not … _unusual,_ for me. And it’s certainly not an excuse to laze in bed the entire week after.”

“You’re _hurt_ , though! If you hadn’t – if it hadn’t been the end of the week, you would have died. You went and got yourself beached, and you were _suffocating_ , and if it weren’t almost duskfall, there would have been nothing that I could do. I think that more than justifies a few days of taking it easy. Please. …Do it for me.”

Erik scowls, but at least he does not argue. Charles moves to the edge of his chair and leans in to brush a kiss to Erik’s cheek, fingers slipping back through his hair, tucking a stray lock behind his ear. 

“Thank you,” he says.

Erik sighs, and even next to Charles’s ear, the sound is almost inaudible.

*

“So do you get PMS, then?” Raven is sitting on the edge of their bed, bare legs swinging through the air, the summer hot and humid and unbearable even with every window thrown open and all the ceiling fans on. “Or, like, pre-shark week syndrome, I guess you’d call it.”

“What?”

Erik looks up from the book he had been reading, sitting in the chair halfway out the door and onto the porch, trying to claim the benefits of shade and breeze alike. It’s getting close to the week of the full moon; he has taken to wearing silks and pure cottons to simulate the feel of water against his skin, to taking long baths and vanishing from their bed in the middle of the night to swim nude in the ocean. He is more feral in other ways, as well; Charles still has a scar on his shoulder from the time Erik bit him hard enough to bleed, teeth like razors.

“You heard me,” Raven says. She leans back onto her forearms, picking idly at a loose thread in their sheets with her right hand. “I mean: once a month, during the full moon, you turn into a wild shark and swim around in the ocean chasing after blood. Sounds like getting your period, to me. So: do you PMS as well?”

“ _Raven_ ,” Charles interjects, frowning. He can sense Erik’s spiking anger in the back of his mind, even if she can’t. “That’s inappropriate.”

“It’s a _joke_.” She glances between him and Erik, who is glaring down at his book as if he could bore through the page with sight alone. “What, can’t you two take a joke?”

Charles gives her a small, tight smile. “I’m sorry, Raven,” he says. “Not today.”

Not so close to the moon. Not when Erik is already on edge.

Raven looks hurt, but just faintly. She has always been so eager to impress Erik; after all, his mutation is physical, like hers. He doesn’t see it as a source of shame, the way society would tell him he should. However, Charles rather doubts that Erik and Raven’s senses of humor run along the same lines.

“Fine,” Raven mutters at last, dropping her elbows to fall back onto the bed, mattress bouncing her entire body slightly, upon impact.

Erik steals a look up at Charles when he is sure Raven is no longer watching, a slight wisp of gratitude brushing up against the periphery of Charles’s mind.

 _Not at all_ , he thinks back. _Though, she does have a point – you_ are _rather pissy these days -_

Erik looks as if he is about to throw his book at Charles’s head, so, Charles cuts himself off and, still grinning, turns back to his work.

*

They met five years ago, when Charles had just finished his residency in aquatic animal veterinary science and was working on his Ph.D. to sub-specialize in marine life. Erik was working another one of his odd jobs, this time fishing king mackerel off the coast of North Carolina. Charles saw him a few times, sitting on the small beach near the marine science laboratory, with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and always gazing out over the waves, across the Sound, out toward the black-green sea stretching on and on and on and over the horizon.

He noticed Erik, but they never spoke.

Not until that night, anyway – the night Charles spent eight hours walking the beach, tracking turtle hatchings along the shore with his clipboard tucked under one arm and a pen behind his ear. It was pitch dark, but his eyes had adjusted over time to make out the world in grayscale … and that was how, of the two of them, he saw Erik first: a man rising pale and gleaming from the water, nude, making his way up onto dry land with long, sure strides, and even in the night Charles could see the strength of those thighs, muscle firm and taut beneath his skin.

“Hey,” he said – called out – before he could think better of it.

The man turned and looked at him. And … good god, Charles thought, but he’s lovely – all clean angles and wet, slicked-back hair, unashamed of his nakedness, which – 

Oh. _Oh._

It was a good thing it was dark, with the way Charles’s cheeks suddenly went hot. 

Well, that did explain the lack of shame.

The man gazed at him for a moment – just a moment – before he began walking again. Toward the road. Still nude.

“Wait!” Charles broke into a jog, chasing after him. “Wait, at least – at least wear my coat. It’s cold.” 

He had stripped the coat from his shoulders and was holding it at arm’s length toward the man before the man could even reply. 

“Please,” he said again.

The man paused, then nodded, and accepted the coat. Charles was a little disappointed when his body disappeared under a thick layer of gray wool. 

And he couldn’t help it – he really couldn’t, it just happened sometimes, whether he meant it to or not – and admittedly, he had significantly fewer scruples when it came to people he didn’t know –

He saw the universe in a million shades of blue, felt the rush of water slip-sliding over his skin, feeding through his gills – tasted fish and seal and lobster and all the other delicacies raw and bloody and magnificent – 

He knew the pain of the change, but also its ecstasy. He knew the freedom others might have called imprisonment.

He emerged from the man’s – Erik, Erik Lehnsherr – from _Erik’s_ mind, feeling a bit as if he was struggling to catch his breath, all the night and sand and salt and the stars above crashing in around him, overwhelming him.

Erik was staring at him, the whites of his eyes catching the light of the waning moon.

“Well, then,” Charles said after a second had passed, once the world had long since spun off its axis. “I’m Charles. Charles Xavier. Will you let me give you a ride home?”

*

Sometimes Charles looks at Erik, really looks at him, and he wonders how he ever got so lucky.

How a long night and a stranger on a beach could turn into something like this –

\- Erik’s hands on his hips, holding Charles steady as he fucks straight into him, stretching Charles wide enough it hurts, though when he bites at Charles’s skin it hurts even more – groaning Charles’s name and dragging nails down his sides, those rough and untamed days as they draw closer to the moon, Erik pressing words into the nape of Charles’s neck: _love fucking you, love the way you feel on my cock, want to hold you down and come on your face, fuck, fuck you’re beautiful, Charles, yes – yes, fuck, I love you so much -_

And the way they curl up afterward, Erik’s seed still sliding hot down the backs of Charles’s thighs, their legs laced together and Erik’s brow tilted against his, their breaths mingling in the air between.

Erik traces the tips of his fingers along Charles’s face, marking out the sweep of his nose, the line of his jaw and the faint scattering of freckles across his cheeks. He looks at Charles like he has never quite seen anything like him, and Charles cannot help but think: no, my friend – no, it is you, who is a miracle. Something wondrous and terrifying, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

*

“Do you ever think you’d move out of here?” Charles asks one night as they’re lying in bed together, Erik’s head resting on his stomach, Charles drawing idle patterns on the back of his neck with one hand.

“What do you mean?”

Charles shakes his head minutely, gazing up at the ceiling. “Do you think you’d ever want to go someplace else, that is. A different beach. A different ocean.”

“Why?” Erik lifts his head slightly, turning to set his chin on Charles’s sternum, trying to catch his eye. “Do you want to leave?”

Charles looks down; Erik’s face is shadowed, his mind muddled enough that Charles cannot read it without going too deep. “I’d go wherever you wanted to go,” he says. “I was just wondering if there was any particular tie you had here, to this coast. To North Carolina in general.”

Erik grins, the expression small and quick on his face. “You mean besides my tyrannical rule over the shark kingdom of the Outer Banks? No. No particular tie.”

Charles laughs and Erik relaxes again, pressing his cheek back against Charles’s stomach. He is already starting to grow some stubble, this time of night; it scratches against Charles’s skin, will leave a little pink patch above his navel by morning. 

Erik’s eyes are closed now, his mind going deep and murky as he drifts toward sleep. “Maybe we could go south,” he says after a while. “I like the heat.”

*

Charles takes Erik’s sutures out a week after the accident. Erik sits ramrod-straight in his chair at the kitchen table, unflinching even though there is a muscle that keeps twitching in his jaw.

“Does it hurt?” Charles asks, darting a glance up at him.

Erik shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It just feels … strange.”

Charles pulls out another stitch with his tweezers, dropping it into the trash can lodged between his feet. “I know. Almost done.”

Erik cranes his neck to look, frowning down at the delicate work of Charles’s hands. “Nice. Maybe you should have been a seamstress.”

“Another life,” Charles says, and they exchange quick grins. Charles snips the last suture, grasps the thread with his tweezers, and tugs. “There, finished.”

Erik touches the puckered skin left behind almost gingerly. “Looks good. Does this mean I can go back to the docks, now?”

Charles fights the urge to roll his eyes. It is a losing battle. “On your own head be it.”

Erik pulls him in for a kiss – and it may be brief, but Charles still finds his eyes falling closed when their minds brush together in tandem, his sense of Erik always so keen, giving Charles a kind of lucidity he does not think he would ever attain on his own.

*

Charles goes with Erik down to the shore, the first night of his next change. Erik is wired taut with anticipation – Charles can sense the tension running deep, down to his bones. He is excited. He smells the sea, he wants to sink into it.

“Are you ready?” Charles asks, glancing up at him.

“As I’ll ever be,” Erik says. When he grins, his teeth are white and sharp.

Erik strips off his clothes, folds them and hands them over to Charles, still warm with the heat of his body. Charles tucks them under one arm, both hands thrust into his pockets – and now, this time, he does not have to conceal the way his gaze drops appreciatively over Erik’s bared form. 

Erik turns and faces out toward the ocean; his shoulders rise slightly when he inhales, slow and deep. Charles watches him step out past the tide line, the water eddying about his ankles, and when he slips just a little further into Erik’s mind he understands how it feels as if the moon itself has a tide over Erik, some thick cord locked into the center of his chest, pulling him out, drawing him over that horizon - the way he craves that moment when the rest of the world falls away and it is silence, it is being-alone, it is Erik’s own world, has been a part of him - salt water flowing through his veins - for as long as he can remember.

“See you in a week,” Charles calls out, over the sound of the wind and surf. 

Erik glances back at him over his shoulder, smiles – and then he dives into the water. Charles watches, expecting him to surface, but he never does. He’s changed.

Charles looks out over the ocean, at the foam lacing the tops of the waves, at the bits of seaweed and broken shell that are carried up onto the sand to gather beneath his feet.

And then –

Charles leans over, sets Erik’s clothes down on a dry patch of beach. He unties his shoes and lines them up just next to them and quickly shucks off the rest of his clothes, building two little piles of fabric by the dune.

He wades out into the ocean. The water is cooler than he was expecting, given that they are in the thick of summer. He wraps his arms around his waist and tries to control the reflexive shiver that crawls its way up his spine. 

He watches the surface closely, looking for any unusual disturbance, any sign that Erik is close by. He does not slow. He keeps moving, walks until he can’t anymore – until he feels the bottom drop away beneath his feet and he is treading water instead, rising up and down with the swell of the waves, the ends of his hair wet and roping together, sticking to the back of his neck. 

The electricity of fear is live beneath his skin, sparking down to the very tips of his fingers – his heart pounds rapid-fast and he breathes sharp and shallow, choking a little on each inhalation, and if he is shaking, now – well, at least there is no one around to see. 

No one human, anyway.

He casts a wide net with his telepathy, seeking a familiar mind. He knows he could control Erik, if he needed to – even in this form – but that knowledge does little to reassure him. He –

\- he is too close.

Charles latches on to Erik’s mind, but it is too late, Erik is _there_ \- god, and how could Charles not have sensed him before, how could he not have _seen_ him, swimming just below the surface of the water, within arm’s reach.

He feels the brush of Erik’s skin against his. It feels rough, like sandpaper, like Erik’s stubble in the early morning, grazing his outer thigh. Fear surges up within him – but there is no attack, no burst of antagonism in Erik’s shark-brain, no sudden pain. Instead, Charles senses … something oddly like _content._

The fear ebbs, and Erik swims up against him again: along his stomach this time. Charles extends his hand and his palm finds the elegant curve of Erik’s dorsal side, the sharp rise of his fin, the fluttering flesh of his gills. Erik’s tail flips around and bumps into Charles’s hip. Charles laughs and feels an echo of it bouncing back at him through his connection to Erik’s mind.

“All right,” he says. Erik’s tail slashes through the water again, splashing it up onto Charles’s face. “All _right_ , all right! I’ll play.”

Erik’s skin again, scraping gently along his legs. Charles turns his gaze briefly up toward the sky, as black above as the water below, the moon bright and blinding in the midst of all that darkness. 

Charles takes in a breath – he fills his lungs with air – and plunges under.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Carcharodon (Crooked Teeth Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2135367) by [septicwheelbarrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/septicwheelbarrow/pseuds/septicwheelbarrow)




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